


shapeshift and trick

by stars_inthe_sky



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: 5 Things, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Department X, F/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room, Rumors, Soviet Union
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 09:26:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2019837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_inthe_sky/pseuds/stars_inthe_sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She’s heard of the Winter Soldier, of course...</i>
</p><p>Five lies whispered in the Red Room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shapeshift and trick

_He never smiles._

She’s about thirty, looks seventeen, and her previous instructors in the Red Room have nothing left to teach her. She’s heard of the Winter Soldier, of course, but she’s also heard how rarely he is dispatched for instruction purposes, so she takes a measure of personal satisfaction in the order to report to him for training.

The feeling is gone almost as soon as she enters the room and he lays her out flat on her back, with a kick to the stomach. Had he been wearing boots rather than going barefoot, he might have broken one of her lower ribs; as is, she’ll wake up aching the next day.

Ignoring the pain, she flips onto her side, flinging her legs around to catch his ankles and unbalance him. She rolls out of his reach as he lands on the mat and gets a kick in the small of his back before he twists to grab her ankle with his metal hand. The plating shifts and pinches her skin, which rips when she yanks it out of his grip, kicking the silver wrist with her other foot and dodging away again. She rolls back to standing, and he jackknifes to his feet as well.

He lunges for her, impossibly fast even by Department X standards, but she has just enough time to duck beneath where his fist is aimed. She leaps sideways and up, and her thighs catch him around the neck and yank him down with her. He lands flat on his back this time, and she whips out the knife hidden in her left sleeve. She presses it against his neck, just hard enough to draw blood.

She expects a reprimand—hand-to-hand combat training is usually just that, and most other high-ranking operatives would have ordered her to turn the weapon on herself for using it in a practice bout against a superior. Instead, his entire body goes slack as he laughs—hoarse and harsh, but genuine. She shifts back, allowing him to sit up, though she stays on guard with her knife drawn.

He grins at her, and it changes his entire face. The wild, hooded eyes are bright with something like glee, and his smile is almost warm, not the thin line of approval she’s seen on so many other trainers. “Oh, you’ll do very well, Widow.”

“I’m not a Widow,” she reminds him, tilting her knife to catch the harsh artificial light of the room.

“Not yet.”

* * *

_He works alone._

Their first mission together is ostensibly part of her training; Widow trainees rarely have cause to use sniper equipment or techniques, but it has quickly become apparent that she is no typical trainee. She can best him hand-to-hand without weapons as often as he can beat her; with a knife or a garrote, she wins twice as often. Her handlers seem willing to indulge the Winter Soldier’s apparent interest in her progress, and experience in long-range targeting never hurt anyone but the intended targets.

They’re on a hillside in Kaliningrad Oblast near the Polish border, still wet from the recent snowmelt. He watches while she arranges the rifle and scope, saying nothing but nodding slightly as she describes the wind conditions. His face is almost expressionless, but she’s begun to make sense of its subtle shifts, and she adjusts her setup according to his unspoken cues. He grunts in approval and positions his own bespoke weaponry alongside hers.

The target is a poet whose subversive writing has attracted the KGB’s attention; his teenage daughter appears to have dissident ties as well, though the girl was not listed as a target in the mission parameters.

She finds them both through her scope, puttering around a garishly decorated apartment as they prepare a meal. To her right, he does the same, ready to make the kill shot if she misses.

She doesn’t.

The poet falls dead onto his ugly carpet in the same breath his daughter does.

It takes her a moment to realize the cause of this, but when she glances at him and his still-smoking rifle, he favors her with a proud, if guarded, smile. “You make a strong partner, Widow.”

“Not yet,” she reminds him.

“After today,” he murmurs, wrapping his metal fingers around her trigger hand, “you will be.”

It’s difficult to tell who takes greater satisfaction in that.

* * *

_He never misses._

In Szeged, she poses as an American expatriate, trying to lay low among remnants of the resistance as Soviet tanks level the Hungarian countryside. The mission is simple: a certain man, handsome and blond and charismatic, must be eliminated to remove the possibility that his group can mount a significant challenge to their occupiers.

She ensnares the target easily, murmuring in Hungarian about American ideals of freedom. Her grammar is perfect, though her accent in the harsh foreign tongue is purposefully terrible. He seems kinder than the usual brand of lecher she encounters on these missions, but he can hardly resist the carefully calibrated charms of a newly minted Black Widow.

She guides him to a windowed side room, and he is just drunk enough to accept her offer to dance for him. As she dips into an opening curtsy, she steels herself for what’s meant to come next—the kill shot following her signal, fleeing from his apartment in feigned terror, setting fire to this base to ensure it dies with its leader.

Yet no shot arrives. She masks her surprise and confusion, falling into a simple but elegant ballet routine. After several minutes, the mark murmurs something meant to be seductive and starts to approach her; just then, a gun fires outside. She pulls back, but there’s nothing to dodge—the windows next to them are unbroken, and he is as unharmed and shocked as she is.

She jumps and twists her legs around the man’s neck, breaking it as she pulls him to the floor, and dives out the window into the warm summer night. The blaze will have to wait.

The Soldier waits for her in the neighboring apartment building as planned. He should be preparing to return to their handlers, but, instead, he’s seated cross-legged on the floor at the base of his rifle’s legs, head buried in his hands.

“You didn’t take the shot,” she whispers as she glances through his scope. “I had him. He was in your sights—he had to be.”

He doesn’t look up. “I did. It went wide. I couldn’t…I couldn’t. He looked like someone…”

Everything she has been taught—including by him—suggests her next move should be to return him to their handlers and report his erratic behavior for correction. Instead, she sits beside him, placing a careful hand on his knee in what she hopes is a comforting gesture.

After a moment, he looks up at her; after another moment, he kisses her. They make love, slow and silent, under the still-poised gun, and the room smells like sawdust.

* * *

_He is unstoppable._

It would take her less than a minute to neutralize the four guards in the observation room with her, but the security measures beyond the door are an unknown risk. They had strip-searched her before letting her enter, so her only weapons now are her fists and bare feet, and she doesn’t like her chances against the impressive if unnecessarily large guns her captors are wielding.

Why they seem so certain she will consider resisting them is a mystery; she knows as well as anyone that no Widow is worth more than the program, and her whole life and person have been loyal to the Red Room since her earliest memories—with one exception.

Her situation becomes much clearer when she sees a small cadre of heavily armed guards enter the laboratory she’s meant to observe. He’s shirtless, unarmed, and surrounded by them. The guards are nervous, however, and the room is full of sharp instruments and heavy machinery.

She knows his techniques as well as her own by now, and she knows that, if he chose to resist, his captors would be incapacitated in the space of a few breaths. He could break through the glass she’s standing behind, and they could mount an effective—if improvised—breakout together.

There would be a trail of bodies in their wake, and they would likely be on the run for the remainder of their lives, but it would erase that look on his face—a marked lack of expression suggesting only defeat, submission, and a hundred other states of being she never imagined applying to him.

But, instead, he lets them guide him into a metal chair and strap him down. A technician offers him a rubber bit, and he opens his mouth to accept it, teeth bared like a beaten dog. She recognizes this room, she realizes, though she’s never seen it; the rumors of a chamber where intangible possessions are taken away have circulated in the program for years.

A Widow must constantly learn from mistakes—her own and others’—to sharpen her edges, so memories are essential. A soldier, however, has no need for lessons, only orders, and he is being punished for disobeying his. She understands, finally, that that is why she is here now, watching.

So she watches, still as a corpse. The only indication she even recognizes the man on the other side of the glass is the white-knuckled fist clenched at her right side. She thinks their eyes meet for a breath before he begins screaming, but she has no way of knowing if he can see her.

* * *

_He is a ghost; you’ll never find him_.

She likes watching him, here in the Tower. He’s not an Avenger yet, but it seems like only a matter of time. In the interim, he assists with the team’s missions, and fighting alongside him again feels as natural as breathing. They move in matched rhythms on the battlefield, and, off of it, she helps him relearn his humanity.

He has more reasons to smile now, and she claims responsibility for at least half of them. He does his share of the cooking, and when he retires to her suite at the end of every evening, no one thinks twice, though a few of the others are quick to tease on the mornings when they emerge together, cheeks flushed and hearts still pounding.

She calls him “idiot,” and he calls her “amazing.” He lets her use his given name, and it feels like a crackling fire after a snowstorm. He likes saying the first name she remembers having, the only piece of self she had for so long, and hearing it feels like standing on a ship’s deck as the waves settle beneath it.

They share things like lazy mornings and dumb jokes and pancakes. He tracks down the best _blini_ in the city, and she finds dancehalls where they still play Glenn Miller. She tells him about her adventures and atonement while he was frozen and waiting. He recalls a childhood like she never had, with friends and a silly nickname, and fighting a war that seemed to have only two stark sides to choose between.

Their life together is an open sky, often dark but full of stars, and they talk about that, too, some nights when the red in their ledgers drips just a little too brightly to sleep.

“Without all of that,” she reminds him at those times, “we’d never have gotten here.”

“If I have a home now,” he reminds her, “it’s because you gave me one.”

She marvels that he could ever have been what the rumors claimed—solitary, humorless, as cold and deadly as the ice that named him. The first time she voices this thought, he laughs.

“Oh, Natalia,” he says, snaking an arm around her hip and pulling her close, “you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

**Author's Note:**

> My eternal gratitude to [Lex](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe) and [Red](http://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham/) for being the best betas a hopeless fangirl could ask for.
> 
> Title is (however improbably) from the song "[Black Sheep](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6-EfveplnA)," which is technically by the band Metric but better known as by [the Clash at Demonhead](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scott_Pilgrim_characters#Bands) from _[Scott Pilgrim vs. the World](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446029/)_.


End file.
